Of late years each community has tried to deny to the other the right to introduce this element of frightfulness into its processions, and these harmless wild beasts have frequently been made to repent of their disguise with bruised bodies and broken heads.  In one large village in the Nellore district serious trouble arose over an attempt on the part of the Mahomedans to halt their procession for the purpose of distributing “jaggery” water in close proximity to an enclosure set apart by the Hindus for the nuptials of their god and goddess at an annual marriage festival, and the Taluk magistrate had to issue a formal order, enforced by policemen on special duty, forbidding the Mahomedans to place the objectionable pot of water within twenty feet of the wedding enclosure.  In all such cases both sides appeal promptly for help to the authorities, and one of the chief and not least wearisome of the British administrator’s tasks is to be for ever on the watch in order if possible to avert, by timely suasion and measures of precaution, the serious trouble that may at any moment arise out of trifles which to the European mind must seem grotesquely insignificant.  Indians themselves admit that it is an even more difficult task for them, as Indian-born officials must almost always belong to one or other of the two communities, and their impartiality be therefore congenitally suspect to one side or the other.

There can be no worthier purpose for either government or public men or private individuals to pursue than a real reconciliation between two great communities estranged, not only by fundamentally different religious beliefs and traditions, but by enduring memories of century-long conflicts and of the very often oppressive domination of Mahomedan rulers over conquered Hindu peoples held down in spite of their numerical superiority by the sheer weight of superior force.  There may have been Englishmen who, believing in the shallow maxim Divide ut imperes, have relied on that estrangement to fortify British rule; but such has never been the principle of British policy.  It has constantly sought, on the contrary, to prevent and suppress as far as possible disorders which, whenever they break out afresh, inevitably revive and quicken the ancient antagonism, and to attenuate it, slowly but steadily, by the exercise of even-handed justice and the pacifying influences of education and the rule of law.

Has the alliance between Mr. Gandhi and the Ali brothers or the fusion between the Congress and League Extremists, Hindu and Mahomedan, proved more effective?  How far down has this Hindu and Mahomedan fraternisation really reached that is based above all on common hatred of a “Satanic” Government?  How far has it even temporarily checked the instinctive tendency of the masses in both communities to break away from their allies and go for each other rather than for that common enemy against whom “Non-co-operation” bids them combine?  Frequent outbreaks continue